Topic: Looking for help to set up an open source charge controller shield + vt100 emula (Read 8286 times)previous topic - next topic

mgshightech

Hi, I am working with another open source group, and we are looking for people interested in helping out with a high quality project creating a modular, dc power distribution system controlled by arduino. We will open source the code and just sell shields, or whatever level of the product people want to purchase, and distribute explanation/promo documents. Module development for the controller will also be done openly so that we have a complete open source dc power distribution system with the purpose of dropping the cost of solar/wind power created on site. (to promote independence) I have already thought out the project conceptually (lots of homework on that) and done a dc power distribution writeup that is posted on another site. (still growing). Cost of solar power is dropping. We want to cut it in half again because of some very interesting factors. I can't explain all of them in a paragraph, see the writeup. But in any case, I have figured out how. If we can get the proper system to fly, there will be a global solar power avalanche that is currently just waiting to happen. So If anyone would be interested in taking part in a historical project that could make money by selling arduino shields and various other innovative and related dc power products please let me know.

oh, that writeup is here: http://egrouphub.com/wiki/index.php/DC_Power_Distribution

:-)

mgshightech

Oh, as an additional perk, you will have the opportunity to work with me. I am an experienced physicist, EE, automation engineer, systems theorist. I am professor grade material, and newbs will have the opportunity to pick up a ton of valuable clues as we do this project. In fact, this project could change your life and dramatically elevate your entire world view. :-)

"VT100 Emulation" Wow!! Talk about a blast from the past. I do not think I have used a VT100 emulator for 20 years and surprised and maybe a little nostalgic that they still have use in the world today. Although, with death of DEC and other mainframes I am at a loss to guess where there use is.

abrookfield

"VT100 Emulation" Wow!! Talk about a blast from the past. I do not think I have used a VT100 emulator for 20 years and surprised and maybe a little nostalgic that they still have use in the world today. Although, with death of DEC and other mainframes I am at a loss to guess where there use is.

We still use it in the telephony industry

mgshightech

vt100 is an excellent means of creating a simple machine control panel that is more reliable than computers. In the automation industry, reliability is super important because when something doesn't work, it can cost thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, so we tend to gravitate towards simpler stuff that doesn't crash on bootup or tangle itself all up into a mess. B&R automation is doing this (very popular german line of plcs) and I think it is a very good idea. On the other hand, I think a good open source control panel needs to support some other standards as well.

While it has been years since I used an actual character terminal, I still use the ISO/IEC 6429 escape sequences that the VT100 first used. Most terminal emulators support it, including xterm that I use under Linux. You can find open source implementations in the xterm sources, among other places. Here is the wikipedia article on the escape sequences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code.

mgshightech

interesting ... the vt100 codes were included into later standards .. of course I knew that, but wasn't aware of the related ansi standard. That's no surprise that this would end up going that direction. It would probably be good to implement the entire ansi standard after getting the vt100 standard in place ... Kinda down the road, but a vt100 solution would be a great start for that loftier goal. :-) Unless of course, someone knew of a codebase that basically had that already mostly solved. I need to look around the open source community for c++ implementations of these standards.

I stand corrected I guess I never thought I would see one and did not think they were still in use. I agree they were extremely robust and it is good to see there is a use for dinosaurs, there may be hope for me also, although I was never so robust.

While most terminal emulators support it at least subsets of ISO/IEC 6429, the Serial and and LCD screen libraries I've used (LCD4Bit_mod.h and LiquidCrystal.h) don't seem to support even basic things like tab (\t), newline (\n), carriage return (\r), and form feed (\f).

Not sure if this will be helpful in your search for code, but the vt-100 terminal was, itself, an emulation of the ASR-33 Teletype.

Well, the Model 33 ASR Teletype was one of the first serial terminals to send/receive ASCII, but given it was a machine that wrote to paper and/or punch tape, and read from the keyboard or punch tape, and the VT-100 was a cathode ray tube with 80x24 characters (or 132x14 or optionally 132x24) on the screen, and it had escape characters for bold, underline, character position, etc.

But I'm not sure I would call it emulation. Certainly if it was going to emulate the Teletype, it would need a paper tape reader/punch (I used to get paper cuts a lot handing paper/mylar tape). To be a full emulation, the VT-100 would also with a speaker to simulate the sounds. since the Teletypes were always noisy. Except for the bell, the only time the character terminals made noise was when the flyback transformer was starting to go, and we would do some percusive maintainance (i.e. hit it to realign things).

Evidently calling the Teletype ASR-33 came from a DEC manual, and it wasn't the official teletype model:

I believe the sources are available at: http://liudr.wordpress.com/libraries/phi_prompt/. According to the page, it is free for personal use, but if you are using the libraries in a commercial product, he requests you pay a $30 license to help fund future work.